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Could the Virginia Avenue corridor eventually challenge Mass Ave as the hip place to live downtown?

A local architecture firm hopes to make a strong
case with an arts-themed development on the site of a former mail-sorting facility in Fletcher Place.

The $9 million project called Fletcher Place
Arts would include 56 mostly one-bedroom apartments, 8,700 square feet of first-floor retail or office
space, and a second-floor office suite to accommodate a not-for-profit organization. It would take up about
an acre at the corner of Virginia Avenue and McCarty Street and include a common area on the roof and a large art installation
in the atrium.

The developer,
Craig E. Von Deylen of locally based Perkins VonDeylen Architects, said what really sold him on the site is
the planned arrival of the Cultural Trail. In fact, he hopes to start construction at the same time work is scheduled to
begin on the Virginia Avenue leg of the $55 million trail in early 2010.

The five-story project must win a zoning change from the city before the developer demolishes
the existing one-story structure. And, of course, there's the issue of financing: Von Deylen said he's
all set for the apartment portion but needs to secure commitments from tenants for the commercial part
of the financing. He's been talking with the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, or iMoCA, about
occupying the not-for-profit space, but no deal has been reached.

Von Deylen already has a track record of apartment development in Fletcher Place, most recently
with Fletcher Place Terrace, a $2 million in-fill development slated to wrap up construction this summer.
For Fletcher Place Arts, which would be Perkins VonDeylen's largest project to date, the firm's focus
remains on aesthetics.

"Our goal was not just to design a great building, but to inspire good design in an underappreciated quadrant of the
city," said Von Deylen, who is working with locally based Level Interior Architecture and Design
on the project.

The Fletcher
Place neighborhood is flush with condos including conversion units at the Union Laundry Lofts and the former
Horace Mann School, but there aren't enough rental options to satisfy demand.

A few visitors per day to the nine-story Villaggio at Page Pointe condo building ask whether rentals
are available in the neighborhood, said Tony Page, president of locally based Page Development, which
built the condos at Virginia Avenue and South East Street.

The project still has 23 unsold units out of 61 total. Page has turned four into rentals for now,
and they go for $3,500 to $4,500 per month, well out of the price range of most prospective renters.
The one-bedroom Fletcher Place Arts units would go for about $1,400 per month with parking included.

"The market will take that easy right now,"
Page said of the Fletcher Place Arts apartments. "That's what everybody is looking for, one-bedroom
rentals. People can't afford anything bigger right now."

Jeff Miller, president of the Fletcher Place Neighborhood Association, sees the proposed project
as a nice Virginia Avenue bookend to the high-end Villaggio.

"We feel like it ties the whole Virginia Avenue corridor together," said Miller, who
has lived in the neighborhood 12 years. "We're hoping it really sparks some economic development
in between; we'd love to see some of the empty buildings filled in."

The project also could help extend the artists' vibe that has been spreading in Fountain Square,
which is just an interstate overpass away from Fletcher Place. Leaders in both neighborhoods are angling
for residential density to support a growing lineup of street-level retailers.

"From a use standpoint, it fits with everything
we're trying to do in Fountain Square," said Paul Baumgarten, an economic development specialist
with the not-for-profit development corporation Southeast Neighborhood Development, or SEND. "We need
to bring more people and income into the neighborhood to make the areas viable."

Von Deylen plans to finance about 80 percent of the project and is considering whether to apply
for new-market tax credits through the not-for-profit Local Initiative Support Corp. He does not plan
to seek city incentives.

Schouten is an Indianapolis native and Indiana University graduate who joined IBJ in 2006 after stints at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Arizona Republic. He covered the real estate beat for most of those years, and launched the Property Lines blog, before taking over as managing editor in March 2013.

Schouten has been honored for investigative and enterprise reporting by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Alliance of Area Business Publications and the Society of Professional Journalists in Indianapolis. During his tenure as moderator of Property Lines, the blog was recognized twice as the best among business journals by the AAPB.

Schouten serves as secretary of the board of governors of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and is set to serve as the organization's president in 2016. He is treasurer of the Indianapolis Press Club Foundation, and a board member of the Indianapolis Public Schools Education Foundation.